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Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

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Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am obligated to call you out: You should have shut down the_donald instead of amplifying it and its hate, racism, and violence. So much of what is happening now lies at your feet. You don't get to say BLM when reddit nurtures and monetizes white supremacy and hate all day long Yeah! How dare they refuse to deplatform 40-60% of the population after they've been thoroughly slandered and misrepresented as white supr…

Ah yes, the "look what you made me do" defense - just as valid here as in cases of domestic violence.

Dehumanizing someone for holding right of center views and then using that unilateral label as justification for targeting them is nothing like domestic violence.

People have started throwing around the labels "racist", "white supremacists" and "Nazi" far too liberally given that these words have the power to destroy lives.

When near center moderates are deplatformed and start to feel targeted for wrong think, you push them to align themselves with the extremists, the only people who claim to actually be looking out for their views and well-being. Not to mention that most of these accusations are based on glaring double standards.

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free speech isn't hard to understand as a concept. If someone says something you disagree with, you debate them. Echo chambers radicalize us all. No one is immune to the effects of groupthink.

So, how do you feel about the fire-in-a-crowded-theater exception?

Fire in a crowded theater is not an exception according to the Supreme Court and hasn't been for a while.

Clear and present danger is the standard.

According to the Supreme Court saying that all members of a certain minority group in must be killed, is covered under free speech, but saying that a specific member of that minority group must be killed at 9 p.m. tomorrow night, it's not free speech but clear and present danger.

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#333
post #46

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This is just scape-goating and finding something recent to blame for a situation that has been going on for 150+ years. Besides, it was effectively shut down, and all that did was lead to the creation of thedonald.win, which by all appearances seems to be thriving and growing rapidly, probably much faster than Reddit itself grew when it was founded. To blame the situation on a forum is to misunderstand that the count…

most people weren't advocating violence in there, most of these claims came from people that wanted to tear it down and provide justification for it. I've seen documented evidence that the same kind of content exists on other subreddits that have not been banned. censorship does not help you win the debate. why won't reddit police left-wing content and calls for violence? all I want is transparency.

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Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#334

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The “only difference” between a group of fascist white supremacists who fantasize about violently exterminating their perceived enemies and a bunch of ordinary people in a community organized around discussing newspaper/news magazine articles who are scared about the growing threat of fascist white supremacists and want them voted out of office and removed from positions of power is that the former have “dropped the…

> group of fascist white supremacists who fantasize about violently exterminating their perceived enemies Ummm, what? so people that support the President are all fascist white supremacists? Is that really where we're at in this country? What about the sizable number of blacks/latinos/and asians that support him, are they white supremacists too? "white supremacist" and "racist", two terms that have been watered down…

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Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#335

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I don’t think this alarmist view makes much sense because all of that has happened, and more. The Right (the group of angry young white men inhabiting r/the_donald not conservative voters) spend every moment outraged about censorship and supposed sleights against them — real or not. Everything you describe is happening every single day and has been since before Donald Trump and will continue after him. If the_donald…

>the group of angry young white men inhabiting r/the_donald not conservative voter The degree to which casual anti-white racism has been normalized on reddit is abhorrent. Even moreso when these people claim to champion anti-racism. Reddit can't die soon enough. It is a dangerous bastion of propaganda - the comments are designed to look authentic but none of the discourse is truly organic because of a combination of…

It's been normalized everywhere, it comes off to me as some sort of badge of honor for people to blame all the ills of the world on one race. Amazing how this doesn't fly for other groups.

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#336
post #274

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> Besides, it was effectively shut down, and all that did was lead to the creation of thedonald.win You don't end up on thedonald.win by chance, you go there purposefully. For a long time /r/t_d wasn't quarantined at all meaning anyone browsing /r/all would see their posts all day long (since they were pretty good at mass upvoting their own posts for that purpose). I don't think anyone advocates for entirely banning…

> anyone browsing /r/all would see their posts all day long I feel like that's only right and correct; in a sufficiently-large community (i.e. a society), anyone intentionally exposing themselves to "everything" should be prepared to view the worst of the worst (of the worst) of "everything." That's what "everything" means! Honestly, I don't get why /r/all even exists, if it's not there for the people who want to vol…

>Honestly, I don't get why /r/all even exists,

I'd venture to guess /r/all exists for the same reason the Facebook News Feed exists: to increase engagement with the site. It's a curation mechanism that amplifies the already popular items within the sub communities, and exposes them to the community at large in a virtuous (vicious?) cycle.

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#337
post #330
post #294

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It's hard to reconcile that theory with the facts of most of the cases that make the news. For example, the police officers who killed George Floyd clearly had no reason to fear for their lives. Or what about all the black folks shot in bed in no-knock raids? The first step everyone needs to take to resolve this problem is to stop blaming the victims of police violence.

>It's hard to reconcile that theory with the facts of most of the cases that make the news. Why would you expect a uniform sampling of cases from the news? Police killed 1000 people last year. Almost 3 per day. How many of those did you hear about? Why would you hear about some vs. the others? > The first step everyone needs to take to resolve this problem is to stop blaming the victims of police violence. Who are yo…

I wouldn't, but I think it's important to be sensitive to what people are actually protesting about. It's mostly these outrageous cases and (in the case of black folks) lived experience that make people angry.

People cite statistics to illustrate the fact that these cases are part of a bigger problem of systematic racism. Some people expend a lot of effort trying to explain the statistics away, but that largely misses the point.

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#338
post #263

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The mods would ban opposing views and leave hateful, violent, and racist views. Its not complicated.

I've browsed TD since it's inception and haven't seen any violent, hateful, or racist posts. That's not to say that they haven't ever existed, but certainly not anything remotely close to how it's perceived. And definitely not any worse than you would see right now on r/politics.

Same here, I don't know what their standard for racist and violent view is?

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#339

Reddit got too mainstream for its own good. The company desperately wants to become the new social media (think Facebook or Twitter), but many users are standing in the way, making the change from a discussion website to a social media website slow. What made me and many others use Reddit in the first place is that it didn't really matter who you are and what's your political and religious background, the only thing…

Do you know of any federated/distributed alternatives to reddit? Although, maybe the argument is we don't actually need a social media platform at all just RSS.

Usenet. Its still alive, though some groups are more active than others; some groups are abondoned many years ago.

Re: Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian Resigns from the Board of Reddit

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, TD alone was huge in 2016-2017 and was a huge contributor to the dynamic we have in the world today. Ellen is 100% right here and Alex did absolutely nothing to address it. Good on her for publicly calling it out.

r/conservative seems to be taking on the role of T_D now, unfortunately.

/r/conservative isn't taking on the role of T_D, but it is taking on the role of unironic right wing boomerposting. I don't even go there anymore because the titles always seem to be variations of "EPIC ownage of LIBTARDS" and circlejerks in the comments, and very little discussion about actual conservative principles.
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